The economic aspect of this licensing scheme is dangerous to the web as a whole:
Before we let avarice and general stupidity reign, we need to ask ourselves:
- How much will it cost to simply post a web page if crucial core technologies are licensed?
- Will these patents stifle inexpensive development tools if the tools must also be licensed?
- Will the core technologies distributed cost increase the cost of e-commerce to the point where tentative projects are abandoned?
- Will companies like Microsoft tie these patents into browser technology, further reducing the competitve abilities of any other browser?
Today's success has come from open standards and high availability of tools, browsers and code. If you control the standards, it also seems that you will also control the development tools and the browsers as well.
These little bits and pieces of technology wold be, potentially, millions of dollars that could be siphoned from the web as a whole - money that is currently NOT being taken from sites and developers. Could today's web economy weather this increased cost of business?
Even moderately increasing the cost of any of doing business will kill the web as a viable market by turning it into a TV-like monopoly of controlled content creation and delivery. Doing this will eliminate the need for the W3C to begin with and reduce the web to another footnote in history.